12 11IE NE.WYORKER Drawing made on the spot of the Olympic Burlesque on Fourteenth Street, showing the world's toughest two comedians, M cÅ llister and Shannon, and the famous Whizz-Bang Babies. THEY CALL IT BURLESQUE T HE burlesque show has gen- erall y degenerated in decency. Down at the old Olympic Theatre on East Fourteenth Street, the honest, animalistic, gorgeously orgiastic burlesque show of ten and twenty years ago is on its last legs. There, and there alone, rough ånd tumble remain. There, in her last sanctuary, Aphrodite Pandemos wig- gles up and down the runways, a crea- ture of reminiscent rhythms, gelati- nous lusts, raucous, merry, unashamed, dowager-goddess of profane love. There are two of these runways. They come out over the parquet like ivory spokes of a dark fan. They are lighted from below. The girls thump out on them to whine the chorus of each song; they go waist-deep in the glow, and are all legs, dehumanÌzed and unidentified legs, among the heads and shoulders, and pinkish cigarette smoke of the pit. Their glutei maximi heave in and out of sparse satin frills, and they pour a shrill, utterly unintelligible sIng-song through the spigots of their nostrils. As they stomp back into the yellower glare of the stage, each of them gyres her body through a pet, practiced wriggle-her mark, her art, her justification in a world of nearly naked truths. It is a hot, grimy night. The smallish auditorium is a bog of damp faces, flowered with cigar ends. The smoke lies like an oily canopy, except where some drunken electric fans above the boxes suck and snort to un- ravel the edges of it. The balcony is thick with grins and suspenders. Down here in the parquet there is only one woman sitting among us: a gentle- faced, white-haired old thing, patient, expressionless, benign. "Hello, mamma!" bawls a fat, lewd-limbed chorus girl in the flip of a sweaty exit from the runway. "Oh, you red hot mamma!" The dear old thing blinks never an eyelash. She might be listening to a sermon on the seven saintly virtues. The girls are bawling a song about "somebody sneakin' in when you go sneakin' out." Even if you fail to fathom a quarter of the gibberish, the tone of it, the leers and bodily up- heavals which accompany it, can leave no doubt. After a verse or two, you do not care precisely what they are singing, anyhow. The meaning is too plain for details, too lurid for em- bellishment. Out of it, a strong, jocose exhalation, steams this one sim- ple sensing of life as a great, fat, pink- ish, lugubrious antic. Mankind on the rampage of the Inescapable flesh. Man, that timorous and hairless cousin of the ape, acknowledging by word and waggle all the grim merriment of his business of begetting. The mood is not without its climax. The chorus creatures have jostled out into the wings. Only their leader re- mains on the stage, a stripped remnant of youth and jaunty grace, a tuppenny Thais, who suddenly leaves off all shrilling and abandons herself to the more direct methods of motion. Her glassy eyeballs roll in and out of fur- rows of mascara, her tough arms spread back, all her primary character- istics convolve in a fierce, regular rhythm. A sailor in the balcony begins to bellow. In the stalls below him, a pair of twitching little clerks reply to him with giggle and chitter. Two comedians, next: a little bit of a man, a huge, burly one. Both wear Latin Quarter pants, comic vests, and derby hats. Both have a couple of gold teeth, and jabber in a Weber and Fields dialect which is minus Fields and Weber. Their jokes are bad, mangled old memorials. But the point of everyone of them crashes home on the jaw of the little man. Five times in two minutes the big man knocks him down. A near-sighted, weakly, plaintive martyr, he keeps on